Ever since it was first spotted this past winter, we’ve wondered how long it would be before we’d have an Xperia Arc of our own to not notice in our pockets. For months rumors flew about which U.S. carrier would be lucky enough to nab the svelte smartphone, with AT&T emerging as the fan favorite. Well, summer has come, and so has the answer — the Xperia Arc is, carrier-wise, flying solo. → Read More
As much as those in Silicon Valley get wrapped up in all the innovative technologies and businesses being built on top of and around the Internet, the fact of the matter is that there are still some striking disparities in the quality of internet access and speeds in the U.S. today.
Pando Networks, a service that optimizes online delivery of media assets such as games, video and software, drew a data sample from over 4 million users in the U.S. between January and June of this year and found, among other things, that the states with the fastest Internet download speeds are as much as ten times faster than their slowest counterparts. More specifically, the northeast and mid-atlantic region (New York through Virginia) averaged the highest download speeds, with 8 of the 10 fastest states, while the midwest and mountain-west regions racked up 9 of the 10 slowest. → Read More
C:\>_
Look familiar? Then you must be old enough to have used DOS, perhaps the best-known command-line-based OS in popular computing history. I’m proud to have done so myself, though a few years later and I would likely have missed out altogether.
The history of the OS is well-documented around the web, and perusing it is a nice reminder of the way things used to be. It came into its own in the early mid eighties (after being bought by Microsoft in 1981), mirroring the rise of the personal PC. Though the many developers that read this blog likely have a more varied personal OS history, DOS is something we can probably all look back on semi-fondly. And it’s turning 30! → Read More
Even though I’m Jewish, I’ve always rather enjoyed other people’s confessions: Saint Augustine, Rousseau, driving instructors etc etc. And now, especially for the tech crowd, we have an new player in the confessional genre – Douglas Edwards, the first marketing manager at Google, who has just written a tell all version of his 1999-2005 stint at the plex entitled I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee #59.
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Polling site Gopollgo has recently closed a $325K seed round of funding from Idealab, in addition to launching a product and site refresh with a focus on gleaning more insights from Twitter followers.
With the new wood-paneled Gopollgo site users can build and customize polls in seconds, easily send them to Twitter and watch as Gopollgo provides realtime analytics and location drill down data for voting.
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The next phase of the web will be ruled by mobile. It’s already happening. Just think about how many killer apps and products are mobile-first or mobile-only. This Friday right before our 6th annual summer party at August Capital, we’ll be holding a half-day Mobile First CrunchUp to talk about where are we in terms of creating mobile products and why so many startups are going after mobile before they even create a desktop Web product. How do the current platforms help or hinder this progress? What new mobile experiences are being created? And how are startups going to make money from all of this?
Our speakers will include mobile founders, engineers, and VCs from Instagram, Foursquare, Kleiner Perkins, Android, Tango, and more (see full agenda below). If you want to buy tickets, we sold out immediately. But you will be able to watch it streamed live right here on TechCrunch starting at 1PM PT on Friday. Please join us. However, we still do have some tickets for the August Capital summer party afterwards. Our last set of 100 tickets are on sale now. → Read More
The sporadic roll-out of Android 3.2 continues with the Asus Transfomer. The company just took to Twitter to announce that tomorrow, July 28th, they will release the 3.2 update for the Android tab. → Read More
Dropbox, the startup that makes it super-easy to sync files between your computers, phones, and other devices, is growing. A lot. As in, they’re about to hire hundreds of people — and they’re getting an office that’s eight times larger than their current space to fit them all.
The company has just finalized plans to move from their current office on San Francisco’s Market Street across town to 185 Berry Street in China Basin, just down the street from AT&T Park. Their current office is around 11,000 square feet. Their new home: 87,000. The company plans to move into the new office early next year.
According to real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle, this is the second largest tech lease in San Francisco this year, after Twitter’s agreement to lease space in Central Market.
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Back around July of last year, Qualcomm launched a software development kit for building Augmented Reality apps on Android. The idea was to allow Android developers to build all sorts of crazy AR stuff without having to reinvent the wheel by coding up their own visual-recognition system. It is, for lack of a better word, awesome.
And now it’s available for iOS. → Read More
For many years I loved Yahoo Finance. It was one of the only sites I used every single day, and the only Yahoo property I used with any regularity at all. But increasingly, I get angry when I go to the site.
So from now on I’m throwing my support (read: eyeballs) behind a lesser-known Chicago-based company called YCharts in Don Quixote-like hopes that one of two things happens: Yahoo eventually gets under fire enough it fixes its product or someone else (hopefully YCharts) finally builds a great alternative for free, detailed, reliable financial information. → Read More
It was just last week that Greg brought us a first look at Rdio’s forthcoming iPad app, and now the streaming music contender has dropped another bombshell on us.
Last night, Rdio CEO Drew Lerner let slip that in addition to their current line up of plans, they will launch an “Unlimited Family” plan that lets users “share an account with multiple people at a discounted rate”. With this, Rdio is breaking out of the pricing rut that they and their competitors have been stuck in, and on top of that offer a compelling new concept for music sharing. → Read More
As Paul Carr and I have written endlessly, we’re big fans of anything disrupting the hotel industry in a simple way that with a clear user value that doesn’t try to be all things to all people.
HotelTonight– a mobile service that allows you to book a last minute hotel in seconds– does exactly that. We test drove it in San Francisco the weekend before MacWorld to see if it really worked. Spoiler alert: it did.
So far HotelTonight’s iPhone app has been downloaded 600,000 times. And today, Android users who travel a lot and hate to plan can enjoy the service too. → Read More
Better lay your millions on the table now and reserve your spot on the ISS now. Russia, NASA, and the rest of the ISS’ partners announced today that they are going to allow the ISS to crash into the atmosphere after it’s decommissioned in 2020. The reason? Space doesn’t need more junk.
The first ISS component launched in 1998 and has slowly grown into a large space station with 15 units. The original plan was to bring the ISS down in 2015 but the European Space Agency extended its life to 2020. But it can’t stay up there forever. → Read More
Earlier this year, eBay and PayPal decided to merge their API and developer platform into a combined open platform business, X.commerce. At the time, eBay, which owns PayPal, wanted to developers one ecommerce solution that would offer a “complete approach” to online and offline business. Of course, since then eBay has acquired open source e-commerce storefront platform Magento as well as e-commerce giant GSI Commerce.
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Over the past couple of years, push notifications have become a vital part of the mobile picture. There are so many apps, and so much that you can do on smartphones, that you need a system to alert you when something comes up that you’ll want to know about. But these notifications are still not a particularly easy thing for developers to wrap their heads around and implement. That’s why Urban Airship exists. And all of the same things can be said about location. Which is why SimpleGeo exists. So it seems to be a good match that the two of them are hooking up for a partnership.
As they’ll announce as OSCON (the open source developer conference) today, Urban Airship and SimpleGeo have signed a long-term strategic partnership agreement. Given the wide-range of services that both companies offer, this could ultimately mean many things. But the core idea is to provide developers with a simple way to offer location-aware push notifications in their applications.
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You remember Locationgate, right? It was that massive national scandal that left both Apple and Google at the center of our discontent, after two German researchers discovered that the iPhone tracks and stores location data automatically. The scandal has spurred numerous investigations into where we should draw the line when it comes to location tracking, and one in particular garnered the wisdom of the NSA’s Matthew Olsen, National Counterterrorism Center lead and NSA general counsel.
At a confirmation hearing in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Olsen answered the question we had all been asking for a while: can the government use our location data to track us? → Read More
AHAlife, an e-commerce site for hard-to-find and exclusive luxury lifestyle products, has raised $6 million in funding led by DCM with FirstMark Capital participating in the round. This brings AHAlife’s total funding to $9 million.
As we wrote in our review of the site, AHAlife introduces one new product a day in editorial format through its email list, tells the story about how the product was made, who made it, and where it came from while allowing you to also purchase the product. Products span fashion, food, beauty, travel, accessories, home décor, tech, and travel experiences. → Read More
How does that old phrase go? “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch?” Intellectual heavyweights like Milton Friedman and Robert Heinlein got a fair bit of mileage out of the quote, and it seems at least one person over at T-Mobile HQ has heard it.
The result? According to TmoNews, T-Mobile has begun to send out free $25 gift cards for use on anything (short of bill payments) inside T-Mo corporate stores. Sounds like a free lunch so far, right? → Read More
